


You Can Be My June Wedding

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Leven Thumps - Obert Skye
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-10-12
Updated: 2006-10-12
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:09:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,055
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The papers are easy to fake. Everything else, not so much. A tale of murder and extremely confusing paternity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Can Be My June Wedding

**Author's Note:**

> This was written so long ago I'm not even going to --
> 
> Spoilers up through Eyes of the Want only. You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/37118.html).

-

 

Their garden is a mess.

It's partly Leven's fault. When they bought the place, he took one look at the empty lot and went straight out and got a whole bunch of seeds without even looking to see what they were. Not seedlings, or even transplant plants, but damn seeds, as if they wouldn't already have to wait until spring. 

When the mystery sprouts finally did rear their heads, the garden was overwhelmed in a riot of colors and smells and it was impossible to find the sidewalk underneath the pumpkin's vines. Most of the pretty, tropical flowers they had died at the first puff of Atlantic wind, leaving them with food-producing plants that were not at all aesthetically pleasing.

"People are going to think we're hippies, looking at all this," Leven says wryly, watching her hose down a particularly ornery patch of thorny ... things.

"This is New York," Winter replies, wincing as the strap of her sundress tightened across raw flesh without warning. "Nobody asks questions here."

He frowns at her, eyes as brown as dirt.

~~~

"So are Winter and I the only ones who have gone through the gateway since Hector Thumps?" The way he said his grandfather's name, one would think Hector couldn't be separated from the Thumps and he was nothing unless he was first and last name. Like familiarity didn't exist at all.

"No," conceded Geth, after a tick. "There was another. A girl. Girlfriend of Sabine's, actually."

Leven's eyebrows met his hairline. "Sabine _dated?"_

"In the loosest sense of the word. Fredricka was a nit--"

"Not a very good one, though," piped in Clover, taking the opportunity to steal a slice of toast. Leven almost expected him to ask for a cup of tea to go with it.

"-- who had an uncanny ability to put two and two together, no matter the circumstances. She was rather shallow and vapid and, as Clover's already informed us, she wasn't very good at what she did. She didn't seem to find pleasure in anything except gossip." Geth paused to think, the leather of his overcoat creaking as he leaned back in his chair of honor, folding his arms. "I assume she was looking for some kind of material to use as revenge for dumping her, when she went sifting through Sabine's work journals. What she found, however, was the directions to the gateway. Directions that even Sabine hadn't figured out, and wouldn't for another decade or so. She gave Amelia no choice but to let her through."

"Why?" Leven frowned, eyes as golden and glowing as honey in the sunlight trained on Geth. "Was she armed?"

"No," Geth chuckled. "She wasn't that clever." 

He suddenly grew somber. "Or maybe she was. You see, she was pregnant at the time."

~~~

It was difficult to secure a place of their own. For all intents and purposes, Leven might have been nineteen, but his birth certificate didn't lie. They scrambled, trying to make up for the five years they never lost but had anyway, studying by night and scrubbing down cafe tables on Fifth Avenue by day.

The small things sneaked up on them. Things like friends, things like safety and peace and the good fortune of having a house with a garden. Everything they had never had when they were little.

"Do you think I have other family out there, Winter?" he asks her, looking up from reading the same paragraph in his civil engineering textbook for the third time and tapping his pencil on their fold-out card table. She watches the bright pink bulb of the eraser go up and down at warp speed. "Other family who were more willing to take me in, but they stuck me with Addy and Terry because they _knew_ the experience would make me grow faster in Foo? Was I their patsy from the beginning?"

"They couldn't have known you'd be an offing, Lev," Winter returns to fixing the run in her nylons, holding her breath against the reek of nail polish. She doesn't look at him. She knows the answer is written all over her face.

He has nobody but her.

Most of the time, she feels like Leven Thumps has been given the shortest stick in the universe.

~~~

"Sabine has _children?"_ Leven yelped, earning him a few curious glances from further down the feast table and a vicious ix-nay-ing motion from Clover. 

"Yes," said Geth, calm and level-mannered as always. "I don't think he ever knew, though."

Leven looked at Winter, as if somehow _she_ should have known this. Which, in retrospect, she should have, and she knew it was all over her face. His eyebrows went up, curious, and she swallowed at the immediate flicker of suspicion that followed. To head him off, she asked, "But what happened to Fredericka and the baby?"

~~~

She doesn't tell him, but she keeps a journal. She takes a ballpoint pen from the coffee mug on the kitchen counter and sits down with the worn, college-ruled notebook she picked up at a stray back-to-school sale ages ago. She got it with the thought she would use it for grocery lists and balancing her checkbook on the days she can't find her calculator, and wound up turning it into her single reminder of Foo.

Leven doesn't read it. She knows he doesn't. If he had, he wouldn't still be here.

Sometimes, Winter wishes he cared enough to pry. Just a little bit. Those are the days she usually writes about Geth. Or Sabine.

There was a period when she didn't write anything at all.

But they don't talk about it very much.

~~~

Suddenly sensing they were breeching a sensitive topic, Geth tried to shrug nonchalantly, reaching for his white wine. "Oh, you know. She got back to Earth safe and sound. Delivered a beautiful baby girl. Married a petty criminal, had another daughter who grew up to be the spitting image of her parents."

"But her first daughter -- Sabine's daughter -- grew up to be one of those amazingly nice sorts, didn't she, Geth?" Well, no one ever said Clover had much in the way of tact.

"Indeed," said Geth softly. "Nice, but very unlucky."

~~~

"Yvonne and Shuku want to know when we're coming to see the baby," Winter murmurs, doing the buckles on her two-inch heels the same she's done them every morning.

"Do they want any pumpkin seeds?" Leven comes up behind her, his pale lips tweaked into a dry smile. His fingers are slipping on the buttons of his suit, trying to figure out why he has an extra one on top and taking a good thirty seconds to realize he's buttoned it wrong. Oh, what he wouldn't give for a zipper suit like the rest of the blokes at the garage. "We have enough to drown them in."

"Dahlia's almost a year old now, Lev," Winter tries to sound rational, but even she can hear the way her voice shakes inside her throat. "We're running out of excuses..."

"No." His eyes are on hers, and she imagines they're dancing golden with fury. "Winter, no. Don't do this."

"Kiss me," she breathes, and he does. The same kiss he gives her every morning.

But then she opens her mouth again, and knowing exactly what she is going to bring up, exactly how bad her resolve to never talk about it again has eroded away, he immediately comes back down and mashes his mouth against hers. The good-morning kiss quickly becomes something hot and open-mouthed. Winter thinks about the letter on her bedside table, and she wonders if now's a good time to tell him about it. Then his fingers are dipping into the hem of her skirt, and suddenly a whole lot lower. Her eyes go dark and she doesn't think of much at all.

They're late for work.

~~~

"What was her name?"

"Maria."

"That's a nice name," said Leven, with all the polite bemusement of someone who hadn't gotten the punch line. "Maria. That's my mother's name."

The sudden, awkward silence was deafening. Geth looked at his plate. Clover looked at the ceiling. Winter looked sick.

~~~

They had separate beds, at first. That had been part of the agreement, somewhere between 'New York is the perfect place to hide' and 'I'll remember to put the toilet seat down if you remember to change the Glade plug-in'.

"Isn't she beautiful?" Yvonne brushes the fringe of her hijab back, watching her best friend spin around with eleven-month old Dahlia in her skinny arms.

"Gorgeous," murmurs Winter, and once again, the voice inside her throat is shaking. Suddenly afraid she was going to drop the infant, she hands Dahlia back. Her throat closes altogether when she sees how smoothly the daughter nuzzled into the mother's embrace. Like they've done it a thousand times before and will do it a thousand more.

She leaves. She is letting Yvonne keep her secret. Today.

She is not ten paces before a heavy-set woman with the smallest comb-over of salt and pepper hair stops her dead in her tracks with a rough, "Do you have a minute?" As if she isn't used to being polite.

"Not really. I'm on my lunch break," Winter replies, offering a genuine apology and trying to move around her.

"Please," the woman grates out, voice rising. "I sent you a letter. My name... my name is Addy Graph."

Winter will let Yvonne keep her secret. But she hopes that someday, somewhere, someone will ask why her best friend's daughter has Leven Thump's eyes.

~~~

And then it clicked.

"You _are_ talking about my mother, aren't you?" Leven said, his voice low and wondering. "Maria Thumps."

"She wasn't a Thumps until she met Amelia and Hector's son," Clover pointed out uselessly.

"Interesting, how the single two people living in Reality touched by Foo managed to find each other." Geth sent him a look that had the sycophant blithely picking at a spot on his chin.

"Must have been fate."

The other light bulb went on in Leven's head. "Wait a tick. If Maria, my mother, is Sabine's illegitimate offspring--" _I'm not your aunt. I'm your mother's half-sister._ "-- then that means Sabine... is ... is..."

"Your grandfather," Geth finished, not unkindly.

"I think I'm going to be sick."

The last, surprisingly, came from Winter, who lurched to her feet and made a mad dash out of the Hall.

~~~

"I hate to say it, but we don't have much in the way of food to offer," Winter hikes herself up onto the kitchen counter in order to check the backs of the cupboards. She pulls out a half-empty can of condensed milk, wrinkling her nose when she spots the expiration date. And the "must be refrigerated" notice. She lobs it towards the trash. "Mostly just things we got for various cooking projects and couldn't find a practical use for it afterwards. Like that time with the fudge. It took us _forever_ to find something to do with the marshmallow crème. We did, though--" she stops and blinks.

Fortunately, Addy doesn't seem to notice her innuendo. She's wringing her Wonder Wipes handkerchief between her thick, beefy hands, her beady eyes flickering around the room. There are signs of Leven everywhere.

The house is clean, for one thing.

"He killed Terry, didn't he?" Addy whispers, and the rush of the dishwasher suddenly becomes deafening. "He did."

"I know," she clenches her hands in her fists to keep them from shaking, kneeling on the countertop.

No one asks questions in New York.

~~~

Clover picked eagerly at Winter's abandoned food, while his burn tried desperately to compute. "How many other people know?"

"Everybody knows," said Geth, as gently as possible. "It was in the last Lore Coil, the one triggered by Dennis Wood's death. You were unconscious when it passed over us."

~~~

"That was sometime after Ezra killed Geth," Winter's knuckles go white against the lumpy ceramic of her coffee cup. "The nits ... they ... they gave us no choice. We had to leave, or else they would execute Clover and Lilly. The nits, my people ... they didn't like Leven, and they liked me even less. They were scary when they're angry. En masse, they're downright deadly."

"Who wasn't out to kill you?" Addy says darkly, picking at a spot on her arm and watching a young Bohemian couple walk past with a pack of some long-haired dog breed or another.

"What's your real name?" Winter asks, causing the other woman's head to snap up in surprise, and she's answering before she can even really process the question.

"Adelaide. My mother was born there."

"Fredericka?"

"Yes. How did you know?"

Winter smiles bitterly. "We were best friends. Once upon a time."

There are many things she doesn't say. There are still secrets she hopes are never unearthed.

~~~

"Did you know?" Leven inquired of Winter later, after he had time to process everything -- all the family he never knew he had, and the true extent of petty corruption that branched down to him, only him, turning him into the man he was. Five years in fifteen minutes, an extra inch for every emotional scar and another layer of skin for every betrayal -- and after she had time to get her feet back under her.

She sat with her arms around her legs on the windowsill over the City of Geth. She didn't even think about lying. "Yes."

He had the sense to stop and think about that. Slowly, he eased from the bed and came to sit by her, long legs dangling down the stone wall in pants that were still a good couple inches too short.

Finally, she turned to him. "Sabine was my boyfriend. If Fredericka hadn't gone and seduced him behind my back, if she hadn't opened my eyes to who he really was... I would have been your grandmother."

~~~

Leven takes the subway to New York City main. He eats lunch at the cheapest pizzeria on Fourth Avenue, and agrees to take a picture of a tourist couple just outside the Chrysler building. He weaves into the traffic and somehow gets caught up in a conversation with a German through the window of a cab car. When their conversation turns to Konigsee, he leaves.

He almost doesn't go into Central Park.

He's faced worst things than this, though.

He sees the girl before he sees the woman. Her dirty blonde hair is in ringlets and she's wearing a tutu that's obviously from a dress-up box, spinning in circles and tossing a handful of autumn leaves above her head. She's laughing, and he imagines for a moment that he can see the flash of evergreen eyes from here.

"You can't hate her for something she could never control," says Autumn from behind him, tucking her crooked old hands into the pockets of her ancient tweed jacket, and childhood loss and poverty strain the skin around her eyes into crowfeet. But the love on her face was real, and Leven forgets how old Winter's little sister is, how cruel it was to dump her niece on her and vanish like that, and how it just really proves that everything goes round-robin.

Instead, he walks up to the little girl, who stops her game to watch him curiously. Autumn's eyes are on his back when he kneels, and says, "My name is Leven."

"I'm Aurore."

"I'm going to marry your mother. Is that all right with you?"

Three years later, they get birth certificates and adoption papers that are as fake as the report that says Leven Thumps is innocent of the murder of Terry Graph, and Aurore comes to live with them.

A couple years after that, Leven stops thinking about how, technically, she's his aunt, and just loves her as his daughter.

~~~

He kissed her. And she heard everything he didn't say.

_I trust you._

~~~

"I don't know what you think you're doing, but _I'm_ trying to watch the ball drop," Leven lurches forward, but Winter darts around the coffee table, sliding on the carpet in her wool socks and wincing at the thought of touching anything metal. She can already feel her hair beginning to stick up off her neck from all the built-up static electricity.

"We've seen the ball drop eighteen times now. It gets old. It's there, and then it falls. I've got something better for us to watch." Still arching herself away from his grabby hands, she aims the remote at the TV. Times Square disappears, replaced by a grinning face they know and love so well.

"Happy New Years!" Aurore leans into the screen, waving merrily, before bracing herself against the side of the space shuttle and pushing herself back so she could talk to them properly.

"Aurore," Leven says warmly, snatching the remote back and bringing Winter back down with him onto the couch. "I didn't know you were going satellite today."

"We've got nothing better to do up here than watch you, and concoct plans to fight the radiowaves to talk to you on New Years," the astronaut replies, all dry, crisp humor. "Is Adelaide there? Or Shuku?"

"Adelaide's at a party, pretending to be cool. And Shuku's gone with a bunch of his buddies to watch the ball drop in the Square. If I tell them you called, they might stay home next year in hopes they might see you again,” Winter laughs, full and bright and happy. She has everything she never thought she would; a home to call her own, a steady job, a husband, three kids.

Amazingly, it makes her happy.

“Do you still have the pumpkin seeds we sent you?” Leven chips in cheerfully.

“The world can end before we run out of pumpkin seeds, thanks to that damn garden of yours, Dad.”

Aurore grins, brushing her sandy hair up and away from her face, where it remained. She floats up, stretching out the limbs with the codes and codes of DNA that nobody knows aren't Leven's, grinning with Winter's eyes and Sabine's ambition and her love, all her own love, Aurore-love she built from her own self, the self separate from rough childhood years and genes that aren't fair.

Winter says nothing when Dahlia joins them for breakfast the next day, her eyes flickering gold.

No one asks questions in New York.

 

-  
fin


End file.
